If I’d remembered everything from my previous life when I got here, if I hadn’t had to have the memories forcibly inserted a few days ago, I probably wouldn’t have recognised Reggie. Not that I would ever forget the last person I talked to before my world was ripped apart but if there had been some distance between that memory and the present, I might not have made the connection.

  Because Reggie had changed. He looked five or ten years older, and those years had not been easy ones. He looked stronger, leaner and more confident. He strode forward with a confident stride that I recognised from when I let my skills move me.

  He was still clean-shaven and there was a slight scar on the side of his chin. I’m not sure if that was making him significantly more attractive, or if it just wasn’t detracting from all the other positive changes.

  I stared at him. He stared at me, along with just about everybody else. At some point, I must have wondered what I was looking at because [Identification] obligingly provided.

  “Oh, hey, Kandis,” he said. He looked guiltily over his shoulder. “You’re looking good. Really good. One sec.”

  A confused babble erupted from behind me, most of it amounting to some variation of “You know this guy?”. I didn’t have answers for them. I didn’t have answers for me.

  “Ah, okay,” Reggie said. “Then… zektra-nal-vohm-prah-tekra-zeef-kal-zeef-kal-drohta-nizum-pleth-jorqa-bintz-ah-reht-pluz-dol-pluz-dol-vor-mazzar-zekto-breth-quah-breth-quah-linza-trop-yadig-klahp-noht-reska-vilto-wektra-jim-nizem-praw-zolthar-zegga-trem-blin-phaz-zot-ultra-rezkar-zektra-nal!”

  Nine people appeared in the room. Nine familiar people, but I didn’t have time to process that. The moment they had appeared, I’d shifted into a defensive posture. It was automatic by now to get into a ready stance while I identified the sudden threat.

  Except the stance… didn’t come to me. I stumbled clumsily, suddenly unsure of where to put my feet.

  “What the hell?” I said, and my voice came out… raw. Unfinished. Unfocussed. I realised that I didn’t have charm to help me out. I realised that the name of my skill wasn’t being highlighted in my thoughts.

  “Status!” I yelled out, but it was just another word. Nothing happened.

  “Don’t worry, everybody,” Reggie called out. “This will fix itself soon!” Then he called out again, in another language. One that I didn’t speak.

  Because I didn’t speak Latorran.

  Despite Reggie’s words, I started to panic. I finally managed to process the presence of the nine new figures in the room. They were shouting at Reggie in a language—or was it multiple languages?— that I didn’t understand. And they were pointing at him dramatically.

  Well, they were gods. Pointing at someone was all they had to do to turn that person into a greasy spot on the floor. Normally. It didn’t seem to be working right now.

  I noticed that Axel’s screen was missing. A small point, among all the other disasters, but I tried to make a point of keeping my eye on that weasely AI.

  A new box came up.

  From the sudden silence, everyone must have seen the same thing. Felicia called something out to me, but I couldn’t understand her.

  Then a second box showed up. With it, my Skills came back.

  I gasped with relief as the babble of the angry and confused crowd resolved into words. I felt my poise recover and my breathing change. Small, subtle changes to the way I stood reassured me that I was back in control again.

  “Why’d you do that!” I yelled at Reggie. No, wait, there were more pressing concerns. I looked over at the gods. From the way they were glaring at him, they were about to… any second now…

  “Did… they not get their powers back?” I asked.

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  “I did not feel that would be a wise decision at this time,” Reggie said. “Can I get you to wrangle them all into an orderly assembly?”

  “Why should I?” I asked.

  “I want to answer all the questions everyone has, and it will go a lot faster if it’s organised,” Reggie said. “And right now, I have to update Axel. It would be great if I could do that without—whoa, buddy!”

  Ashmor had given up on aggressively pointing and had staggered up to us, looking to make a personal intervention. He took a swing at Reggie, who dodged it effortlessly, caught the arm and twisted it behind Ashmors back.

  “I will kill you,” Ashmor said. His tone was oddly conversational. “Just as soon as I work out the mechanics of… this…”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re very dangerous,” Reggie said in a soothing voice. “I’m surprised you can walk, actually. You’ve never had to before.”

  “Walking is nothing to a being of my intellect and power!” Ashmor spat. “I will—”

  “Sit down and be quiet,” I snapped. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  Ashmor’s eyes widened in outrage even as he obeyed me. I could feel the resistance he put up to my [Persuasion] and it was pathetic.

  “You’re back to Level One, aren’t you?” I asked. “Your stats have reset, you might not have even spent your first points.”

  He tried to answer, but that would mean speaking, and he wasn’t allowed to.

  The feeling I got from Reggie, on the other hand, was a dangerous blank. My skills didn’t touch him. [Identification] didn’t work any more. He grinned disarmingly at me.

  “Looks like you’ve got it well in hand!” he said and jogged over to the dungeon core.

  “We could still try shooting you,” I muttered to his back. He didn’t respond.

  “Okay, everybody!” I called out to the room. “Get over here and get seated.”

  “Sit? On the floor?” Toriao objected. The gods were quickly getting used to their powerlessness, but they were still being pretty haughty about it.

  I gave her a withering look, just short of the one that had put Ashmor on the floor.

  “Sit, yes,” I said. “On the floor… I guess I can do something about that.”

  I reached out with [Earth Magic], but the floor was made of a stone too… hard for my total to affect. So I turned to Phantasms. Individual chairs would have been too much, but benches could hold a lot more people. I did three for the gods, three for my people and the survivors and three for the Emergency committee. I arranged them in an arc, three rows deep, arranged around the blank square that Axel had appeared in before he was shut down. Then all I had to do was chivvy everyone to sit in them.

  “Kandis, what’s going on?” Felicia asked. “Who is this guy and where do you know him from?”

  She asked the question, but a lot of people were listening to the answer. Only the gods, who’d barged into my memories at the time were aloof from listening in.

  “He’s from the memories I got when we came here,” I said. “He’s from the startup that… crashed Earth.”

  “And he’s a part of the group that’s trying to restart it,” Borys mused. “Who better? But how did he survive?”

  The question had been on my mind, and not just in relation to Reggie. How had I survived? I’d been at ground zero of… whatever it was. The event.

  “I think… data can’t die,” I speculated. “It can be erased, but as long as it’s properly stored, backed up and logged, it can stay around forever.”

  If anyone knew what to make of that, they kept it to themselves. Before anyone could say anything else, our pondering was interrupted by Axel’s screen coming back to life.

  “Whoooo! What a rush!” Axel said. “Synchronisation complete!”

  He made his image look around at us all. “And I see that everything is going to plan! Excellent!”

  “Maybe you two can provide some explanations, then,” I growled.

  “Oooh, that’s scary,” Axel said. “Makes me glad I don’t have a physical presence for your Skills to interact with.”

  He looked around again. “This is nice. I should have foreseen the need for an auditorium but I didn’t know how many people you were going to bring down with you. You know what would really finish it off? A couple of pot plants. Do you think I could prevail on you to…”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Fine, fine, I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you here.”

  “If you tell us there’s been a murder, I will shoot your core,” I snapped.

  Axel made himself look frightened. “But what if there has… fine, fine. You have all been part of an elaborate plot to get these fine folks made helpless and placed in our power.”

  He indicated the gods and then turned to the NPCs

  “You lot only played a bit role, but there's no shame in that. I crafted you perfectly for the roles you played, so all the credit goes to me. The stars of our show, on the other hand, were our Champions! Let’s give a big hand for Borys and Kandis everybody!”

  Nobody clapped, except for Axel.

  “You explain,” I said to Reggie.

  He shrugged and walked into the focus of the arc.

  “What some of you know of as the [Status] didn’t originate in this universe. Different versions of it exist in many universes, customised to both the nature of the universe in question and the needs of whoever is in charge of it. My team has studied various instances of it over the years. It’s a radically different computing paradigm, but in the end, it's still programming. We worked out how to hack it.”

  “That was what that gibberish was, before,” I said. “You null buffer overflowed it.”

  “Something like that.” Reggie laughed, not bothering to correct my jargon. “The thing was, we knew that even with administrator access, we still needed the gods to be right in front of us to make the changes.”

  “Dungeons are nominal spaces, universes unto our own,” Axel interjected. “If the gods wanted to watch what happened, they had to be here. Invisible and intangible, sure. That wouldn’t matter when the System crashed. And so, we put on a show that none of them would want to miss!”

  “My memories,” I said. “Were they fake, then?”

  “Oh no,” Reggie said. “They had to be real. There was no way we could fake them well enough to avoid detection. Since they were your memories, you were the only one that could absorb them. The plan only came together when Axel discovered the identity of this generation of Champions.”

  “And how did he manage that?”

  Axel giggled. “You might be shocked to learn that the elves aren’t all humourless, dutybound freaks. Some of them appreciate a turn in the gatcha levels.”

  “Ugh. I think I’m going to be sick.” I turned to Reggie. “This is who you’re working with?”

  Reggie shrugged apologetically. “We’re extremely limited in whom we can work with in this world. He’s the only entity with access to a portal. If it helps, his instances in the other universes are getting a lot of psychological counselling.”

  “Sadly for the profession at large, my psychoses are intractable,” Axel said proudly.

  “So this whole plan was predicated on me coming down? What if it had ended up being someone else?”

  Reggie looked away. “Axel would have… had to…”

  “Kill the party they sent down!” Axel finished with relish. “You got the easy route, you know. The elves are going to be so surprised when you come back up.”

  “I don’t know if you’d find Champions so easy to kill,” I said.

  “I’ve done it before,” Axel said. He smiled slyly. “I’m reasonably sure I’ll get a chance to do it again.”

  “Things worked out, so we didn’t have to,” Reggie said flatly.

  “So… why?” I asked. “Why do all this? What was so important that you had to disable the gods of another world?”

  “It’s simple enough,” Reggie said. He looked over at the stony-faced gods. “They have something we want.”

  Dungeon Hopping For Fun and Profit, which was going to be an action-adventure story of a guy who was basically running from one dimension to another all the time. The idea was that he'd pop into one dimension, get into trouble, not exactly solve his problems but stay ahead of them long enough to find the next dimension and jump into it.

  knew that there was no way I could do it, but I wanted to do it so badly. Could I put Phantasm on hiatus for 2 years? No. Could I just write more? No.